Angusville
2011/08/15
Angusville is the closest town to our property in Manitoba at 11 miles distant. It was the place we picked up our mail (no rural mail delivery) and did our banking.
Bustling downtown Angusville, circa 1992:
That photo was taken from the empty lot that used to be the site of the Angusville Hotel, which was standing and in use (as a hotel and weekend strip club) when we moved to the area in 1982. It burned down a few years later and the empty lot is now a picnic site.
Returning now, the town is pretty much dead. Only the municipal office still seems open. The post office appears closed, replaced by a row of locked mailboxes. The credit union branch also appears closed, as are the two businesses that mattered:
The Angusville Cafe, run by a nice man named Curnie. We sometimes ate here, but the real attraction for me was that he had an arcade machine; my parents would set aside time for a leisurely coffee so I could play for a while. For a while it was Warp, and another while it was Arabian.
Chuchmuch Store – run by a member of the Chuchmuch family, though I don’t know his first name. He was an aging, grumpy man who watched all his customers like a hawk – he had trouble with the natives from the nearby reserve drinking vanilla off the shelves and spread the same mistrust to outsiders, which means us since we’re not from one of the local Ukranian clans.
It wasn’t a terribly good store, and his prices were high, but occasionally it saved us the extra 20 miles to Russell or Rossburn.
What’s important about this store is that he had a comic rack.
You know how as kids we used to be told about how the Eskimos have 22 different words for snow depending on its type, and the Japanese have so many ways to say thank you? In Manitoba I learned that there are many qualitatively different flavors of boredom. Comics were one of my outlets; I read every book I had many times over. At the time I was into Disney talking animal comics and Gold Key / Whitman adventure comics.
But at the Chuchmuch store I discovered something new. The unusual cover art led me to pick up an issue of the justifiably famous Demon Bear arc of The New Mutants. I was hooked instantly – this was something new. Here was a superhero comic (a genre which hadn’t really captured my interest before) but with characters my age, good character development including strong female characters, and really innovative art that went beyond mere representation and into interpretation. After that I picked up every issue I could find, and branched out into Uncanny X-Men as a result of the crossovers. The New Mutants is still my all-time favorite comic series, and one of only a couple I went out of my way to complete. It was my NM collection that I took with me to Coombs to pass the time.
Another Angusville-based thing I did for entertainment was that I subscribed to a stamp club to get exotic postage stamps to look at and collect. So a trip into town to check the mail had me anticipating some new brightly colored pieces of paper to look at. Yeah, different times.
Back to today. I saw a couple of interesting things on the community bulletin board:
I admit to being surprised as how good internet and cell phone service is in these parts, by which I mean they exist.
Also, auction sale!
Auction sales are a popular form of entertainment here – a chance to get together and gossip with people you perhaps don’t see quite as often, and paw through some poor deceased neighbor’s stuff.
Yes, the word “sale” is redundant and no, they’re not selling auctions. That’s just what they call them in these parts.
Arnold & Hedley used to be the main auctioneers in this region. I imagine they’ve retired now, but man were they good. They could talk a mile a minute but you could still understand them, and they had eagle eyes – don’t scratch your nose while bidding is on or you might end up buying something. I loved going to auction sales half to listen to them work and half to paw through the goods.
Russell
2011/08/15 – one part of several to come; lots to cover about this day. Might take me a few days to catch up with it all.
In the early 1980s my father was working in construction in Calgary, but saw the end of the boom coming. My parents wanted to buy some land to live on, so my mother and I spent a lot of time travelling around looking at properties. In 1982 we bought 80 acres near Angusville, Manitoba, and moved there. More about the land in a later post.
Angusville being a tiny town, the two nearby towns that we went to for supplies were Russell and Rossburn. I’ll post about Russell first because that’s where I arrived first on the current road trip.
Unlike most prairie towns that are shrinking, Russell is holding on. A couple of buildings have come down and a couple have gone up, but more or less everything is the same as I recall. Except for the main street, which now has the future standing over every corner. Top picture 1992ish, bottom today:
Detail on the arches:
There are some new businesses though – there never used to be any chain restaurants here, but now there is an A&W, a Tim Horton’s and a Subway. The old Russell Inn restaurant is still around and still fairly good, and that’s where I prefer to eat.
The Russell Inn was founded 20+ years ago specifically as an attempt to stave off the slow death of the town by making it a tourist haven. They’ve also developed a ski hill nearby. That plus the town’s location at a major crossroads seem to have done the trick, but it means the town is really counting on the Inn and the tourist trade to stay alive.
Fond memories ensue.
Russell is where I did my driving test and first got my driver’s license – I actually learned out in the country in my parents’ vehicles though. I did my driving test in my father’s 3/4 ton pickup – not an easy thing to parallel park, but otherwise I had no problems. I grew up riding in the front seat all the time, so I was very familiar with the particulars of driving long before I got behind the wheel.
The remains of the town theater (actually there were two, the other being a drive-in on the outskirts; it died first). Disney likenesses probably not authorized. This is where I saw the first and best Transformers movie, and also saw Baby and Old Yeller (man, that one got me good).
The laundromat at the end of the main drag. We came into town every two weeks like clockwork to wash our duds here. For a while they had a Zaxxon machine, but I mostly killed time a few blocks away downtown at:
P&D’s Pizza (now an empty lot). P and D were a young husband and wife team who operated a pizza/burger joint and arcade here. The restaurant was nice because it had high-backed booths with lots of room in them, but of course I was mainly here for the games. They rotated through lots of games and I spent lots and lots of money on them. P&D’s was still around when we briefly returned in 1992, and there were newer games then. The main ones I remember from both periods were:
- Radical Radial
- Slap Fight (wish I could find working ROMs – loved this game)
- Mach 3 (impressive visuals but not much of a game)
- Xain’d Sleena
- Exerion
- 3 Wonders
- Street Fighter II – usually with a crowd of native kids around it. We had a grand time beating the crap out of each other in this game.
For the times when I wanted a different selection of games, there was a pool hall right across the street, in the grey stone building here:
Tougher kids hung out here, but they never hassled me except for one time one of them challenged me to a game of pool. I lost.
This place is where I first saw the original Street Fighter – boy, was that a difficult game! Also super popular – the controls were often busted. They also had (at various times) Blasteroids, Black Tiger (which I mastered so well during my time in Toronto that it became a way to kill time on the cheap), and Extermination, which was a rather unique vertical-scrolling shooter that I’ve never seen anywhere else and would like to play again.
I mentioned the ski hill – it’s about 20 minutes outside of town as Asessippi Park – and yes, I’ve already made all possible jokes about that name so we can take them as read, OK? Anyway, I also went back there today. We used to go for picnics, fishing and swimming there. Here’s the “beach” and swimming area:
The lake isn’t natural – there is a dam offscreen to the left. My father often took me fishing below the dam. But near the picnic area there was a delightful little stream, with a miniature concrete dam on it. I used to love to play in the stream, making more dams out of gravel. To my delight, it’s still there exactly as before:
Slow on the uptake department: I always wondered why this little dam was here. I just realized today that it was for kids, and meant as a play-sized version of the much bigger nearby dam. Duh.
Today yielded enough things to fill another post or two, but it’s late and I need sleep. Will resume when I can. But here’s today’s map (sorry, haven’t had time to look into the centering problem yet).
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August 14
Today I drove from Swift Current, Saskatchewan to Russell, Manitoba. Despite what people say about Saskatchewan, it was actually a more scenic drive than yesterday’s drive from Calgary to Swift Current. That section of Alberta is actually flatter and more desolate than Saskatchewan.
I had planned to detour to check out the historic Claybank brick factory, which looked like good camera fodder, but decided against it when I discovered the road leading there was gravel. I was willing to invest an hour driving on paved roads to go there, but not two on gravel.
So I continued on to Russell, taking the shortcut through the Qu’Appelle Valley (yes, Saskatchewan does have 3D features). Not a whole lot to say about it; another long drive with no real personal significance to me and only short stops to stretch and snack.
On arrival at Russell I just went straight to the Russell Inn, the only good lodging in town. Discovered that they had misunderstood my phone reservation request for a quiet room at the back and instead had me in a noisy room at the front, and that they only had me for one night instead of two because the next day was fully booked. Thankfully a back room was available and later on someone cancelled, so I`m in a quiet room for two nights after all.
Initial impressions: Russell has grown – it now has at least three chain restaurants where before it had none, and the Russell Inn itself is twice as big as it used to be.
Tomorrow I`ll have a better look around town, then head out to the farm and survey the environs there.
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On the road again
Road trip notes for 2011/08/13.
Not much to say about today. I drove from Calgary to Swift Current. It’s a rather boring drive. This land has its beauty and I really missed the big skies, being hemmed in by mountains in Vancouver, but with the exception of some hills near Medicine Hat the terrain along this route is rather repetitive.
No remarkable photos to share.
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Calgary memories part 2
Another day of visiting old haunts with Frink. Starting the day with a lighter dog-related note, here’s Frink holding his mother’s new puppy, Shadow. Shadow is a rat terrier, eight weeks new in this photo:
Puppies are so delightful. A ball of wiry nervous energy, eager to please her new packmates and licking and nibbling on and faces or hands within range.
Breakfast with another old friend took place at Tubby Dog.
First order of the day: Forest Lawn. Another place we used to go frequently when we lived in McKay Lodge. One reason was to get me some socialization; being homeschooled and at the time not yet integrated with the neighborhood kids, my parents enrolled me in a bowling league.
That’s me in the baseball cap. I did get a trophy for something at the end of the year, but I never really made friends with any of the other kids. This is where I was forced to learn to tie shoelaces; facist bowling alleys didn’t have slip-on or velcro bowling shoes!
I am amazed that this bowling alley still exists and is apparently still open today.
Also in Forest Lawn:
It’s a Zellers now, but when we first moved to Calgary it was a K-Mart. It might have been in a slightly different location on the lot too, but that doesn’t matter much. What’s important is that this is where I played my first arcade game. My mother went in to buy something and I was distracted by the bright colors and bouncy music of a City Connection machine by the door. My mother gave me a couple of quarters to try it, and the course of my life to date was decided in the next few minutes.
I became a diehard arcade rat from then until arcades finally died out in the 90s. Calgary in the early 80s was a great place to be an arcade rat – every mall had an arcade, most of them were pretty safe places to be, and most of them took the gaming hobby seriously. Almost all of my allowance went to quarters, and when my parents went shopping at a mall they would simply give me a roll of quarters and park me in the arcade until they were done. Usually they had to drag me away.
Naturally I got into home video games too, but they were never the same; arcade games always had better graphics, better music and sound, better controls and so on, and there was something about the arcade experience that just didn’t translate at home.
On to the next landmark: The Calgary Tower.
Once Calgary’s mightiest phallic symbol, it has since been eclipsed twice. But for old time’s stake I decided to go up and shoot a panorama of the city. I’m not posting said panorama because I can’t get the stitching software to do a good job on it.
There’s a new feature up there that i don’t remember from before: a section of glass floor. I could not make myself step on it – the desire to not fall is strong in this one.
Another memory-loaded site I spotted while up there: the central Calgary Public Library.
This library was the source of most of the books I read when I was a kid. My mother and I used to frequently ride our bikes over here (on Calgary’s stellar bicycle path system) and load up on books for me.
In more recent years, I saw Douglas Coupland speak here on his Microserfs tour, and got my copy signed.
Final tour stop of the day: my kindergarten. My parents actually did enroll me in school – for all of six months. Halfway through the year they changed teachers on me, and I did not like the new one at all. I was a sensitive kid, and the activities she had us do usually ended up with my going home crying. My parents pulled me out, and I was homeschooled all the way to the end of grade 12.
My class:
(Plane not actually inside school). That’s Miss Patterson, the good teacher, on the right end. That’s me standing at the other end.
The sitting boy in the red pants, blue jacket and white cowboy hat is Arrey (or something like that), my only friend in the class. We played together a few times at his place outside of school. I was somewhat jealous of him because not only did he have more Lego than me (one of very few people I’ve met who did), but he had one of the earliest Lego train sets. Somehow I conned him into trading me a couple of the blue rails from that set, which was stupid on both our parts since there wasn’t much I could do with only a couple of rails, and it made his set incomplete. But I was young and blinded by brick envy.
The platinum-haired girl standing behind Arrey in the photo is the first girl I remember thinking was cute. I don’t remember her name; just that she was extremely shy and quiet.
We capped off the day with another nerd gathering for supper at Peter’s Drive-In, which is apparently favored by none other than Hugh Jackman. It is my favorite burger joint of all. It’s not fancy, it’s not gourmet, it’s just delicious. The milkshakes are the best too. Avoid the fries though; they give you a lot of them, but they’re not very good.
Back on the road eastbound tomorrow. Visiting Calgary again has been great, and I wish I could spend more time here. The city is still very familiar; I had forgotten how easy it is to get around in this town, and the city fits like a glove. I could easily see myself living here again.
I used to bitch about how crazy Calgary drivers were, but now they seem tame in comparison to Vancouverites.
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